Putin's Sledgehammer
The MERCURY project invites you to a book talk by Professor Candace Rondeaux on her book 'Putins Sledgehammer: The Wagner group and Russia's collapse into mercenary chaos' followed by a discussion with MERCURY PI Dr Sorcha MacLeod and an audience Q&A.
In June 2023, the Wagner Group assembled an armed convoy that included tanks and rocket launchers and set out on what seemed like a journey to take control of Moscow. The last person to attempt such a venture was Adolf Hitler.
Putin’s Sledgehammer provides an in-depth account of, and essential political and economic background to, the story of Prigozhin’s meteoric rise and abrupt demi.
Wagner’s power began from patronage, then grew from international theft and extortion, until it was so great it exposed the weakness of Russia’s conventional military and became a threat to the Russian state, one that was not demonstrably eliminated until a private jet containing Wagner’s core commanders was blown up in midair.
That Yevgeny Prigozhin, a local criminal thug, was able to build a private army that was on the threshold of overwhelming the world’s second largest country seems incredible. In fact, it was inevitable following the hollowing out of the Russian military, the creeping use of contract groups for murky foreign missions, power struggles inside the Kremlin, and the ability of the new militias to corner and exploit the black economy.
Told with unique inside sourcing and expertise, Putin’s Sledgehammer is a gripping and terrifying account of a superpower that contracted its soul to a pitiless militia.
About the book
A Washington Independent Review of Books Best Book of the Year
Academic Books on South Campus will be stocking the book ahead of the event.
About the Author
Candace Rondeaux is a Senior Fellow with the Future Security Initiative at New America, and she is a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, where she teaches courses in irregular warfare and open-source intelligence. During June 2026, she will be a Visiting Researcher with the ERC-funded MERCURY project at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Private Governance in the Faculty of Law.
A columnist for the World Politics Review and frequent contributor to the Financial Times, Rondeaux is a geopolitical risk analyst, investigative journalist and the author of Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos (PublicAffairs, 2025). She is the Founding Principal of Frontline Atlas, an independent public interest intelligence platform that tracks hidden geopolitical dynamics. She is also co-editor of Understanding the New Proxy Wars (Hurst-Oxford University Press, 2022).
Registration
Please register for the talk here.
The talk will be in English.
About MERCURY
MERCURY is a 5-year €2M project funded by the European Research Council that focuses on the accountability void for victims of mercenarism. It combines cutting-edge, data-driven mapping and analysis of mercenary operations with thorough legal and qualitative analysis. The mapping provides a novel understanding of contemporary mercenarism to underpin legal analysis of the shortcomings and weaknesses of national and international frameworks when it comes to access to justice and remedies for victims. Via legal and qualitative analysis, MERCURY is evaluating routes to accountability and remedy via international and national human rights courts, tribunals, mechanisms, and transitional justice processes, and will propose potential pathways to justice for victims.
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